Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Caveats of converting images from GIF to JPG using Java

Java has come so far that we expect it to be mature enough and handle any possible use-cases such as a simple GIF to JPG image conversion without any hiccups. But when converting GIFs which happen to have an alpha (transparency) property about them, the results of the conversion seem less than appealing.

To the layman (myself included) who knows nothing of alpha or transparencies, the impression the resulting image leaves is often described as:

some how the colors have been inverted or reversed

feels like you are looking at an image in a film roll

everything seems to have had its black & white colors somehow switched about

These impressions make for a very difficult google search but when you do get the search words right (transparent gif jpeg alpha convert) you should hopefully end up at a post similar to this one which educates us about what is really going on and that there is much more to still look forward to from Java.